Product Reviews
Moving heavy loads over soft surfaces
...up the beach, so does the roller, but traveling only half the distance the boat travels—it moves one boat length, the boat moves two—and eventually pops out astern. Two rollers allow a boater to keep the boat moving without it coming to rest on the beach. The rollers work on both sand and cobble beaches. With the weight of a...
Boat Profile
Built by eye and shaped by batten
...the others, is built of pine screwed to the thwart risers. Closed-cell Styrofoam flotation is mounted beneath the thwart. The rear thwart is composed of five individual pieces, resulting in a visually interesting seat whose components can be individually removed for refinishing. My first, and most lasting, visual impression of this boat was that it’s decidedly graceful, but it took...
MUSTELID
Outer Passages
...Expect the unexpected. The Tlingit People were here from the time of legend. Fur hunters came, and whalers. Miners by the hundreds. Moonshiners to quench their thirst and the Law to staunch the flow. Nowadays, a few come, then go: hunters and fishers, kayakers and yachts. Fish biologists at a tribal chum stream. And now, in this episode, us. https://youtu.be/QaipCgNf5vM...
MUSTELID
Outside Waters
It’s now September and we’ve left the outer coast; we’re in outside waters, but once again in familiar surrounds. This is a short stretch, but it includes two of four communities on Chichagof Island. Together, they top 100 residents. The south end is hemmed by steep granite walls that rise abruptly above timberline. Many find this inlet oppressive, even ominous....
Small Boats Annual 2007 Flipbook Small Boats Annual 2015 Flipbook Small Boats Annual 2009 Flipbook...
Boat Profile
Nostalgia with 10 coats of varnish
...Marine Services offers reproductions of the highly regarded Chris-Craft kit boats from the 1950s. The single-cockpit Comet GR is a “Gentleman’s Racer.” Shotwell tracked down two 1950s Chris-Craft kits in the garage of a New Jersey yacht broker, still in the original packing crates. Research at museums and reverse engineering of completed Chris-Craft kits ultimately gave him a catalog of...
Boat Profile
A beautiful and practical daysailer
...taught at the school. The design needed to be technically interesting, with plenty of different operations, yet not so complex that it would take forever to build. It had to be safe and handle well enough that it might be a candidate to join the school’s waterfront fleet, and at the same time be practical enough that a student might...
Boat Profile
A classic design for plywood construction
...a tag line to let it roll over gently. I added gunwale guards (see Currents, WB 181), brass half-oval guards on the upper stem and the skeg, and an improved footrest. This year’s project has been the addition of a compass bracket. Last summer during a pestilential fog with darkness coming on, a small demon appeared at my shoulder, sneering...
Boat Profile
A small lapstrake gem
...and her easy entry and run, this would be a simple and pleasurable boat to plank. Either light copper rivets or clench nails would serve as fastenings for the plank laps and conceivably even for the plank-to-frame joints. It’s typical in a boat like this that the lapstrake seams don’t leak—water coming in is more than likely coming from the...
Boat Profile
Quick to build, fast to row
...lower edge of each plank. Aren’t computers grand? To assemble the hull, we’ll place the square edge of a plank into its neighbor’s rabbet and join everything with twisted wire ties (as in common stitch-and-glue construction). Then, using a plastic syringe containing epoxy filled with silica, we’ll fill the voids at each lap…no tricky compound bevels needed. Because the hull...
Boat Profile
A Cat-Rigged Sharpie
...evening competition that came to mind when McIntosh conceived a boat for dinghy adventuring and racing in Great Bay. Terry Picard With its 90-sq-ft sail the MerryMac can make way in a whisper of a breeze. “I launched the first MerryMac on Thanksgiving day,” he recalls. “It was 1953. I was 37 years old and had been building boats and...
A lifetime of inspiration
...“I used this shape but flattened it just a bit,” compared to the 15°-deadrise in sandbaggers. During tank tests of a prototype model, he was impressed how the combination of these elements in the hull design affected wave shape. “It does not have a deep wave at hull speed like other boats.” He also pointed this out in pictures, and...
Rough-water skiff
...to stitch-and-tape construction (see WoodenBoat No. 106, page 80). The relative merits of these building methods can make for spirited debate. It would seem that the latter technique sometimes trades a cleaner boat for a dirtier shop. It would seem, too, that a composite (“taped”) chine can produce a stronger joint than can any solid chine log of reasonable proportions....
An 11' 6" beach cruiser
...can work into each other as they swell, and they’ve been known to cure imperfect plank bevels with no help from a builder’s hand. On the Jersey beaches of my youth, cedar-planked skiffs seldom required seam compound. Boats planked with mahogany consumed gallons of the goop. Stimson includes alternate specifications for sheathing this skiff completely with plywood. Although we might...
18'7" Hardangersjekte
A striking double-ender, form perfected by evolution The hull design for this handsome jekte (Norwegian for this type of boat) should be credited to generations of builders along the shores of Hardangersfjord, Norway. We’re told that these double-enders enjoy a reputation for hard work and possess rough-water capability comparable to our peapods and Sea Bright Skiffs. One day in...
Fitting Out Guide
Parameters for success
...promised to never reveal their secret (sorry, guys), they informed me that the little white rollers left a finer stipple, giving a smoother finish. I tried them. The varnish guys were right, but the downside is these rollers come only in short lengths, inadequate for a large surface. The yellow foam rollers come in three sizes and fit standard roller...
A likable 15' catboat
Corvus comes with a gaff-headed sail and a cuddy, or as an open, lug-rugged daysailer (far right). A small boat with a big heart,” that’s how an anonymous editor at WoodenBoat described this little catboat from Charlie Wittholz’s drawing table. In fact, Corvus (named for a stellar constellation that resembles a gaff-headed sail) might be just about the right...
Dasailer and Beach Cruiser
Based on traditional Shetland workboats, this rugged double-ender makes good use of plywood and epoxy. When asked by WoodenBoat to talk about my Chesapeake Bay open-boat cruising adventures of long ago, I described a typical ( or perhaps a composite) summer’s day: Up at first light after having slept on the beach; take a short, slow walk along...
Boat Profile
A Y-sterned canoe
...is on the form. Then the hull is pulled from the form in the usual manner and completed before canvasing. To build this boat in this manner, you must first build a labor-intensive form that gives the boat its shape and provides a backing for attaching planks to the steam-bent ribs. If you are lost at this point, this may...
Boat Profile
A beach-explorer tender with a design pedigree
Paul LaBrie is new to professional boatbuilding, but the design he chose for his first commercial project is one of the oldest in this publication. CARPENTER was drawn up by L. Francis Herreshoff in the summer of 1929—his Design No. 41—and featured in his book Sensible Cruising Designs. In an era when small boats were less commonly created for their...
Boat Profile
Wooden boats for whitewater
...also is easier to hold stationary in the current, or, if you want to have a little fun, surf a standing wave. Photo by Dan Spurr Sawyer Cobra oarlocks are an accessory designed to work well with rope-wrapped oars for whitewater rowing. Kits are available for the company’s 13′, 15′, and 16′ Freestone Classic models and the 15′ and 16′...
Technique
A guide to common construction methods
...the hull form seem more like an organic creation. We are naturally attracted to repetition in lines and forms; it’s an aesthetic principle that seems rooted as deeply in boatbuilding as it is in art, architecture, music, and even the written word. Perhaps it makes complex things more understandable by breaking them into their component forms. How complex are lapstrake...
Boat Profile
Dave Gentry's skin-on-frame version of a Massachusetts classic
Living amidst many inland lakes and rivers, and near the north shore of Lake Michigan has turned me into a boatbuilder. It took a while to commit to building a boat, but in the winter of 2015 my wife, Sue, and I decided I needed an interesting snow-season project. I looked online for an easy-to-build rowboat that we could use...